“You’re not. Don’t stop. Fuck, Jack. Don’t stop.”
I haven’t cursed so much since the night Skylar collapsed in the hallway. But I don’t fight it. I let it happen, all of it, and whatever Jack sees in me, it makes his eyes flash. Makes him drive into me harder, faster, and only his unyielding grip on my jaw keeps me in place.
He wants me wrecked.
In the very best way, and instinct tells me he won’t stop until I am. Won’t give himself what he needs. And so I surrender to it. I let him have me—all of me—and he watches it happen as though it’s the most wondrous thing he’s ever seen.
He watches mecome,then he surges inside me, his mouth fused to mine, and this emotion, this mind-bending bliss…it’s like nothing I’ve ever known.
For a few charged seconds, there’s nothing but a shimmering afterglow. The receding thud of my pulse, the tremor in mylimbs. Jack’s weight over me as we both breathe as if we’ve been dragged from the raging sea.
He’s shaking too. But he doesn’t let me go—not yet. He clings on and he laughs, low and so full of awed disbelief. “I was right to be fucking scared of this.”
His dazed words yank me from the abyss, reminding me how different this is to anything we’ve done before. To blowing him and him blowing me. This was both of us out of our minds at the same time and as the heat drains from my blood, the sudden blankness in his eyes reminds me how dangerous that is.
I hold him against me. “You’re all right, love. I have you.”
For another long moment, Jack doesn’t answer. Because he’s not here. But the absence seizure is brief. Doesn’t even drop his head before it scatters.
“See?” I kiss him. “Nothing to be scared of.”
Jack hums, catching his bearings. Then he’s acutely aware again—of me, of what we’ve just done, and that he’s still half hard inside me.
He pulls out with the same care he pressed inside me with. “Are you okay?”
I nod. “Yeah. You?”
Jack laughs that laugh again. Then he’s in motion. Up and out of the bed with only the slightest waver to his balance.
He disappears.
Comes back with clean-up supplies.
When he’s done fussing, I take my turn in the bathroom, fix the hallway door that has somehow come loose from its latch, and drift back expecting to find Jack if not half asleep, at least in bed.
He’s not in bed.
I collide with him in the hallway, my sex-drunk body walking into his hard chest like it’s magnetised. “Wha?—”
Jack steadies me, hand snapping to my shoulders. Then he speaks words that shift the whole night. “Where’s your grandad’s concertina?”
I blink. Reality lands hard and the age-old urge to deflect rises in me as natural as breathing.
But I can’t do it.
Not with everything we’ve done, everything we are, still clinging to my skin. “I don’t have it anymore.”
“Where is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why the fuck not?”
“Because I pawned it.”
Jack’s brows cinch in a harsh frown. Like he’s trying to force words into a shape he understands. “Why?”
“I needed the money.”